Project Leader Selection

How do you evaluate and select people for project leadership? Putting it another way, you have been given a stack of resumes of people who want to manage the project. What do you do? Evaluation starts with defining the approach to interview and assess the candidates. Here are some guidelines for international projects:

Ask them about the issues and problems they addressed in the past. How did they handle them? This is very important since you are testing their problem solving ability.

Ask about political problems. Find out how they identified and dealt with political factors. This reveals their sensitivity and awareness of political factors.

Ask what key things they learned from their past work and how they put it to use. This helps test their ability to learn and improve. This also gives you an idea of what was learned from project failure and success.

Pose several situations from your own projects. You might include some of the things we have mentioned earlier in this chapter. See how they respond. How quick are they on their feet in dealing with issues?

If you are seeking some specific area of skills such as finance or engineering, then rather than ask about general experience, you should pose a situation in that field and see how they respond.

Experience over the years has shown that this approach has gotten to the person’s strengths and weaknesses far better than asking about items on their resumes.

How do you evaluate and select a project leader after doing the evaluation? Follow a two-pronged approach. For each candidate rate their suitability in terms of the criteria that was mentioned in the previous sections. This gives you a rating of their strengths.

Now turn it around. Go for the weaknesses and risk. For each candidate identify three areas where they are weak and where the project would be at risk. This gives you the negative side of the coin. Many times this is more important than the strengths.

For multiple project leaders, you can probe and consider more criteria related to the specific business or technical functions, experience in the country, etc. Again, this reveals the benefit of going with two project leaders.

An even more proactive step is to seek out people who would be good project leader candidates. Often, these people have not even thought of being project leaders. What do you probe for to see if these people are suitable and interested? Here are some questions:

Can they work with limited supervision? This relates to initiative.
Can they be extracted from their current work? This is a good test since it considers the ability of the person to turn over work and whether they are willing to make a major change.